Turkey Trip

I'm about two weeks late on this post, but as most people say, better late than never. We had a fabulous trip to Utah for Thanksgiving. We had a great flight with no holiday hassle traveling, no horror stories to speak of. Our friends the Eckersley's made up for our lack of horror stories in their trip to Utah, but those stories are for them to tell! The kids were great on the plane, we each took one, and played with our iPods, colored, and played Bakugans.

We were only in Utah for 4 whole days, 2 travel days, so it was a short trip. We managed to see all of our family and a few friends, some of which we hadn't seen in years! We had Thanksgiving dinner with Chris's mom and uncle's family. It was a delicious meal and great conversation. There were too many highlights to write down, but hopefully pictures will capture some of them.

The day before we left Maci had her 1st grade music recital at the school. She even had a speaking part, her recipe for Mashed Potatoes at a Thanksgiving Feast. She did a great job. We have bits on tape, if I ever figure out how to upload video, maybe I'll do that!!

The Highlight of the travelling part of our trip, the Captain on one of the legs of our journey let the kids sit in his chair, and even pull things and push buttons, set off alarms, all while the plain was off of course :-D But the kids thought it was very cool, especially Gavin! He was in there probably 5 minutes? the Captain was really great about it, the stewardess said he's just a big kid.

I should have taken more pictures! We had plenty of Grandma and Grandpa time on both sides, cousin time, sister time for me, candy making time, and wrestling with Uncle Todd until he's ready to scream time! Although it's never enough time (especially when we miss you all so much), we really enjoyed our trip.

This week we've been busy getting ready for the holiday. I saw a kit to make rice crispie houses instead of gingerbread houses and thought that looked fun and different, so the kids and I gave it a whirl one night while Chris was at school. They loved it. I thought this might be more edible, but after sitting out for a couple days, I'm pretty sure it would break a tooth, and Uncle Don would be very upset at us! Still, the pieces were a little easier to attach on a flat surface instead of a vertical house. I saved the mold so we can make them again!

Chris has finals next week, so he's been studying like crazy and getting projects and papers done. He's looking forward to his month off of school, even though he's planning on working on his thesis a lot during that time. We finalized most of our Christmas shopping tonight, thank goodness, we're not usually this behind! Now to wrap it all and get ready for the big day. We're planning on going to Silver Dollar City tomorrow, they're supposed to have fantastic Christmas shows and lights this time of year. We're going to brave the 30 degree weather (feels like 20, or so the weather man tells me) and keep warm for at least a couple hours while we have some fun!

We found some time to squeeze in some family pics with Joel Jenkins. Thank you for squeezing us in Joel on such short notice!! They turned out so great, I LOVE them!!

All the Trimmin's

We were a little pre-emptive this year and put our tree up tonight! Since we're leaving on Wed. for UT we thought we'd get it done before we left so it would be looking great when we got home. We did the lights on the house yesterday and all the little shelf stuff, and saved the tree for tonight. The kids were excited about it all day, and it was a relatively low stress, low anxiety event for all! which sometimes doesn't happen even though we always want it to. The tree looks great, but going through all our Christmas boxes I've realized I have a lot of stuff I don't use anymore, time to streamline and dejunk!

So we're off for Turkey Day and very excited to see friends and family. Hope all your Thanksgivings are full of friends and family and lots of yummy food!

Nuttin Honey

Soooooooo, haven't posted for a couple weeks. Maci is reading Junie B. Jones Books, Gavin is playing with Bakugans and is obsessed with watching YouTube videos of people putting their Maxus Dragonoids together, Chris is gone 4 days/nights a week at school, I'm up to my neck in craft orders. That sums up our last couple of weeks!

Maybe if I look at what pictures I've taken it'll jog my memory as to what we've been doing. Here's what I've got.

Yup, this one is old news from while my mom was here helping me recover. We've taken no pics the last two weeks! besides of craft projects. Pitiful.

I had a checkup today, all is good. I get to actually start taking Clomid tomorrow! Yipee that we've finally arrived to this point. Our trip to Utah next week makes it a little more difficult to track my progress, but we'll just kind of leave it up to chance this first month I guess, we don't have much other choice at this point. I'm fine with that. They have you doing like 3 ultrasounds a cycle, plotting this, timing that, take a shot for this, check your follicles on this date, it's too many complicated timings! So, for now we'll just see what happens.

We had a funny interesting thing happen, I don't want to read too much into this, but I want to write it down for future reference? I was thinking of baby names the other day, as babies have been on my mind?! and I really like the name Ellie, but want to name her (if it turns out we have a her) something longer so her nickname would be Ellie. I thought Elaine, since that is a family name, which I like but I'm not in love with. . . Eleanor, which is cute too, but again, not in love with it, then thought Elizabeth. My sister Anne's first name is Elizabeth, it's a "family" name, yes, I like Elizabeth and call her Ellie. I didn't talk to anyone about this on that day. I came home, was making the kids dinner. They got talking about little brothers and sisters, mostly because all their friends have baby brothers or sisters right now. Of course Maci wants a girl, Gav wants a brother. So Maci, out of the clear blue, says "I think we should name our baby sister Elizabeth". I have never ONCE talked to her about the name Elizabeth, she doesn't have a friend named that, I don't know that anyone in her class is named that, it was just completely out of the blue! on the same day I had an incling that I liked that name as well. Anyway, maybe there's a little Elizabeth up in heaven waiting for my follicles to get in line!

I've also had a couple twinges that we might have multiples. Of course your risk is upped with Clomid, but not that significantly, I think it's like 5%. So maybe it's just in my head that we might and that's why I've been thinking about it. But I think I'd really be ok with it at this point! We've always said we'd try for 4, and maybe this is my way of getting it easily without going through all this again. Anyway, who knows what will happen, but if we do end up having twins, or heaven knows, triplets?! I think I'm prepared for that possibility and would be grateful for it.

Well, again I know this is all "personal" stuff, but I WANT to remember all this, so I can look back when we have a beautiful baby and say, see, all that was worth it!!


OK, back to what the kiddies are up to. Maci is an artist. She loves to draw. I showed her how to draw something or write something, and then go around and around it in different colors, radiating out. We used to do that when we were kids, with our names, etc. She loves this "technique" and has started doing it on all her pieces. She loves to draw girls with pig tails. She's moved on from the rainbows, those were so last year ;-D She can write in full sentences, she's flying through school and loves every minute of it, although when I picked her up today she was in tears. She said a boy kept putting his hand in front of her face. She asked him to stop, and he just kept on doing it. I'm not sure why this upset her so much, I guess just the fact that she asked him to knock it off and he wouldn't?! Chris told her that sometimes boys do that when they like you, and she said in disgust "He does NOT like me!" like how icky could you get dad, I'm glad she still has that reaction!

Gavin Gavin Gavin. He is my little buddy. He's such a good sport, patient with me and my crazy wood crap I have to do during the day sometimes. He plays the Wii, plays Bakugans by himself, plays cars on the kitchen floor by me, he's just a good sport about it most of the time. When we have to run errands, he has to know each and every store we're going to before we get in the car. He usually chooses to wine about one of the stores, but now that I have my trusty iPod Touch, with lots of fun games on it, the complaining has been less :-D Gavin needs a haircut desperately, before we leave for UT for Turkey Day for sure! His faux hawk is like no other. Gavin is learning a lot, and mostly on his own because heaven knows I have not been doing my motherly job by printing off worksheets and flash cards for him to study and go through. He is a puzzle genius. He's very good with spacial relations. We also won a game basket at the Fall Festival at school last week. It had a lot of great games in them, but our 2 new favorites are Marbles!! and Toss Up. The kids love trying to hit the Marbles, I never would have thought that such a cheap game could entertain them so much, and Toss Up is a blast for the whole family. It's a dice game that is easy enough for Gavin, but entertaining enough for the rest of us. I creamed everybody last time we played :-D but I think Chris let me win. Gavin is my best bud, and I'm trying to soak up this time I have with him before he starts school and before we add another bundle to the mess. His laugh is infectious and his mischevous smile brightens up my day.

We said goodbye to our good friends the Dunakey's last week. They have been SO WONDERFUL to us since the first week we moved here. Tom literally moved our whole house from our truck into the house, by himself, and Chris, and he didn't even know us?! Their girls have been such good friends to our kids, their oldest McKenna, who is 11, would come and watch the kids while I did woodwork in the afternoons, they're just great kids and we're going to miss them so much! They moved to Omaha for a new job :-( Angelita has been one of my closest friends here and it really hurt to let her go! But we hope to keep in touch and will be bunking in their fabulous new house on our way to UT when we go, or maybe just to party for a couple days!

I did not intend for this to be such a long "journal" type entry, but that's what blogs are sometimes! I promise the next one will be filled with snowfall pics from Utah with friends and family for Thanksgiving. We can't wait to get there and soak up the love of Home for a couple days. Until then. . .

That Bewitching NIght

We had a fantastic Halloween Week. We started off with Carving Pumpkins on Thursday night, had Maci's classroom parties on Friday night, then Trick-or-Treating on Sat. We also picked our pumpkins out at the patch at Rutledge Wilson farm, which was really fun as well. Here's the pics, they don't need much explanation! Hope your haunting night was as fun as ours.

Surgery Schmergery

I know I'm behind on Halloween stuff, I'll get that posted today as well. Just thought I'd jot a little line about the cyst situation. My surgery was scheduled for yesterday, and went pretty well. I went in at 7am, they said the Dr. was ahead of schedule and they got me ready pretty quickly. Then I sat on a gurney for about an hour, guess his "ahead of schedule" turned the other direction. Then they gave me my happy juice and the rest is a blur, until waking up in another room feeling totally crappy! I had a slight cough going into this, and they wanted me to cough to get my oxygen levels up, You want me to WHAT?! youch, that really hurt. They wheeled me back in with Chris to wake up the rest of the way. I gotta say, I'm a lot more sore than I thought I would be, they made 3 incisions, all pretty small, but my stomach is feeling the pain. I went home about 7 hrs. after I arrived, drugged up nicely and ready for bed. I pretty much slept the rest of the day/night. This morning I'm feeling pretty good, still not moving too much, and my back hurts from being in one position too much. Thank goodness for my wonderful mom who flew out to help with the kids. She's totally babying me and it's delightful. The kids are having a ball with her, making cinnamon rolls this morning. Thanks mom!!

So the prognosis. When I went in for my pre-op a couple days ago, the Dr. assured me that they would try and save the ovary the cyst was attached to. He said generally this isn't a problem and it should be doable. Well, when he came in to speak with me right before the surgery, he said he'd been thinking about my case all weekend. He said because the cyst had grown so fast, egg sized in about 2 months or so, that he was slightly concerned that it was cancerous. He said if he got in there and the tumor was a solid mass, he'd have to cut it up in little pieces to get it out and get it off the ovary. Then if it was cancer, it would spread and I'd have to have chemo to make sure we got all the pieces. SO, he thought it was in my best interest to just have the whole thing removed. Cancer vs one less ovary. . . . seems like an easy choice, even though it was not what I was expecting or hoping. So they took the ovary. He said my left one would compensate and start ovulating every month, which is good, I didn't know it did that?! He checked out lefty and got it working as well as it can, so in a couple weeks we'll start the Clomid treatments and go from there.

Taking the ovary was my greatest fear going into this. Now that it's happened, I just feel that it's all going to work out ok. Chris gave me several priesthood blessings of health and comfort, and I truly do feel comforted by my Heavenly Father that everything will be ok. He knows our righteous desires to have another baby, and when the time is right, even if it's through adoption, I know that it will happen. It may take a while, years even, but I know that it will happen.

Thanks for all your prayers and thoughts, I have the best friends and family around. We'll keep ya posted! and I promise to get the Halloween pics up :-D

Haunted House

Here's some pics of our Haunted House of the gingerbread variety. We had fun slurping on the frosting and adding the finishing touches. Maci and Gav love every minute of meticulously putting on the candy and adding the windows, door, etc. Turned out pretty cute if I do say so myself!

The last pic is of the kids dressed up for our Trunk or Treat we had tonight at church. We had a great time.





There's a recurring theme here . . . Maci's cheeseball grin!! Still a cute one though :-D


One more, the kids have a thing about climbing on us when we're sitting down, maybe it gets our attention and makes us not ignore what they're saying?!? Anyway, this was the end result on one such occasion.

Gavin turns 4, take 2

So I'm MONTHS behind, but thought I'd jot down what we've been up to the last little while. Gavy's actual birthday on August 30th was great, we opened family presents and had his favorite dinner which I think was meatballs. Thanks to all the grandparents for the great presents. You've all hopefully heard this Thank You in person by now ;-D

I wanted to write down a few of my favorite things about Gavin.
Gavin is such a happy little boy, except in the morning. He needs at least half an hour to get into his groove, but after that, he's usually all smiles and loves to play and help.
He's very into Power Rangers and Bakugan right now.
Even though he's all boy, he still loves to play dress up and My Little Pony with the girls. He also HAS to paint his fingernails while Maci and I are painting ours, he has to be part of the fun. We usually paint them black to make up for painting them at all :-D
Gavin loves playing with his sister. They usually play really well together. They still sleep in the same room together, and I'm anxious to see how they do if/when we separate them any time soon.
Gav has a few fun words that he says that we get a kick out of.
Breakdast
Calapitter
Meed (Need)


I know there's way more of those, I just am having a brain freeze tonight. I'll have to come back and fill them in.
Gavin gives the best, tightest hugs ever. He'll come up and squeeze your guts out and say "I just love you so much" Melts your heart. He loves helping me run errands during the day and is my little helper. He's happy to do this, as long as we can cruise the toy aisle "just to look" while we're out. I love this little guy, and can't believe he's 4!!
Love you Gav!

SO, what else have we been up to? School started at the end of August. Maci has Mrs. Struckhoff and is really liking her and 1st grade so far. She's doing really well in school and is ready way above her 1st grade level. She loves doing her homework each weekend and just loves school in general!
Chris is still loving school and is very busy this fall. He's observing other students doing therapy at the school clinic, The Murney Clinic, one night a week, and has class 2 other nights a week, so 3 days a week he's gone from around 8 till around 9pm. Long days for him!! In January he gets to start seeing clients at the clinic, and he's very excited about that. He's loving school and has enjoyed giving practice IQ and First Interviews this semester for a few of his classes. He's still working part time and teaching the Deacons at church. Busy guy! but loving it all.

I've been busy busy with Super Saturdays this fall. I've done 6 in total I think? A couple in OR, UT, ID, and AZ. It has been a great blessing, but I think I've decided I'm a much better creator than producer, I enjoy the creative process much more than pumping out 60 sets of Spooky letters. But I guess it all comes with having a business. You do whatcha gotta do.

PTA has been very busy, and enjoyable for the most part. We had a successful Open House and had a good turn out, everything went pretty smoothly. Because of some of my health stuff going on I decided I just couldn't keep all my pans on the fire so to speak, so after much thought, I decided I needed to step down from PTA. I let everyone know last week, and they've already had 2 people step up and say they'd fill the position, which is a great relief to me!! So I will help from the sidelines from now on, but am happy to let someone else fill the "president" shoes and take charge. It's been a great learning experience though and if things settle down for me personally in the future I wouldn't be opposed to being on the board again. We'll see ;-D

On the baby front, we were planning on starting the Clomid routine, when they found a large cyst, about the size of an egg, on my right ovary. We waited a month to see if it would shrink, but there was no change. So we found out this week that I'll need to have surgery on it, probably around the 1st of Nov. I can't start any fertility treatments until this is taken care of, so it's kind of a must to get rid of it. It's a same day surgery, so shouldn't be too big a deal, recovery should be a couple days. We're hoping that after this we can really get going on the Clomid and hopefully see some "results" soon. Sorry if this is all too personal for a "blog" but I see this as my little journal, so I wanted to jot down my thoughts and remembrances about all this. I know hopefully when we get a baby here that this will all "seem but a small moment", and we're trying to keep positive about the whole situation. I am so grateful for the 2 beautiful kids that we have and for the most amazing husband that I am blessed with. But we still hope to expand our little family to a little bit larger ;-D

We've been so busy we haven't done too many "fall" things yet, but the weather has definitely cooled down. We hope to drive down to Arkansas sometime in the next couple weeks, we hear the foliage down there is a little more colorful than here. Hopefully we'll still get to enjoy a little bit of our favorite time of year.

I need to take more pictures! Next time. . .